Number of landline-free households up 10% in US

A new study suggests that US consumers are still abandoning landlines in favor …

It's that time of year again, when the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) publishes its biannual study of US consumers' new penchant for cutting landlines in favor of cell phone service. The latest news echoes the trend we've seen from past studies: wireless-only individuals and households are on the rise.

This latest study spanned from January to June 2008 and included responses from 30,150 adults and 11,238 children less than 18 years of age from 16,070 households, making for a 19 percent increase in respondents from last fall's study. Overall, NCHS found nearly a 10 percent increase in wireless-only homes to 17.5 percent—that's more than one in six households. Approximately 16.1 percent of US adults—or 36 million—live in wireless-only households, while 17 percent (12 million) children live in households with nothing but a cell phone.

For this study, the NCHS defines a family as being "an individual or a group of two or more related persons living together in the same household unit." This means that multiple families can live in a single household (say, two unrelated roommates taking on the world together), and a family is defined as being wireless if any member—adult or child—has a working cell phone. As the label may suggest, families identified as wireless-only if there is no landline in the household.

From the NCHS' previous study of July-December 2007 published in May, wireless-only households were just under one in six at 15.8 percent. About 14.5 percent of adults (32 million) and 14.4 percent of children (10 million) were estimated to live in wireless-only households.

Unpacking subgroups from the latest study, NCHS found that the largest group of wireless-only households is composed of unrelated roommates (63.1 percent), which is up nearly 10 percent from the previous study (56.9 percent). One third of adults renting their homes had no landlines (33.6 percent, an increase of nearly 10 percent), and were three times as likely to be wireless-only as adults who own their homes (nine percent, which is still up 20 percent from the previous study). Nearly 36 percent of adults aged 25-29 live in wireless-only households, while 31 percent of 18-24 year-olds live in the same.

These numbers taper off when passing the age of 30, though all age demographics still increased their wireless-only adoption over the previous study. Just over 19 percent of adults aged 30-44 are wireless-only (up nearly 20 percent), while 9.2 percent of adults aged 45-64 (up 13 percent) and 2.8 percent of adults 65 and older (up 21 percent) have also snipped their landline wires.

Adults living in poverty (26 percent of the study) and adults at near-poverty (22.6 percent) are more likely to live in wireless-only households than higher income adults (14.2 percent). Men are more likely than women to go wireless-only—18 and 14.4 percent, respectively—and adults living in the south (19.6 percent) and midwest (17.8 percent) were more likely to cut their landlines than adults in the northeast (9.8 percent) or west (13.7 percent).

Among "wireless-mostly" households with both a landline and a cell phone, 22.7 percent received "all or almost all" calls on the latter, which is a somewhat surprising increase of just under two percent over the previous study. This demographic accounts for 13.3 percent of all households surveyed, another low increase of just under two percent over the previous study.

As we noted previously, this trend towards wireless handsets is affecting the market in different ways. Telemarketers are surely feeling the squeeze from a dwindling base of potential victims customers, and the "do not call—ever" extension to the Do Not Call Registry can't be helping matters either. Plus, with traditional telecoms bowing to demand and competition for "naked" DSL lines, consumers have one less reason to hang on to a traditional home phone landline.